


Sweet Dreams

by sometimes_writing



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6254938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sometimes_writing/pseuds/sometimes_writing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season 11. Wash doesn’t yell when he has nightmares. Tucker doesn’t understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet Dreams

Taste comes first.   
  
Blood, metallic on his tongue. He’d bitten down on himself to stop from screaming. _Normal, Wash, you have to look normal. They’ll never let you out if they hear you scream. Keep the voices down, no matter how hard they tear at your throat._   
  
Scent comes next.   
  
There’s a slight burn in the air, like a candle just blown out. It would alarm him if a surge of annoyance didn’t come with it, so in all probability it was because someone had tried cooking. He just needed to piece together who.  
  
 _“Tucker did it.”_  
  
 _“Shut up, Caboose.”_   
  
Ah. Right.   
  
Then there’s sound.   
  
A human voice, by his right ear. He can’t make out the words, but the speaker seems to be babbling in the tone of one completely past the point of stressed out. He would know a thing or two about that.   
  
Then touch.   
  
There’s death grips around both his wrists. He’s being pinned down. He realizes that he’s been thrashing in his sleep again, and he fights harder against the restraint as soon as some level of consciousness is reached, but the grip only tightens. Whoever it is leans closer, babbling faster, and there’s a metal piece hugging the helix of his ear that…that someone gave him that warms with the speaker’s breath. He needs to remember who.   
  
“Wash, you gotta snap out of it.“  
  
Wash. That can’t be right. Who was Wash? He searches, and instead finds the remains of David. David and his sisters, colony children of colony children.   
  
_“Don’t touch me!”_ Mandarin, from his mother. He had a mother, who’d had to raise her kids on her own. She taught him how to shoot and how to fight, but despaired over how much he fought with his own sisters.   
  
There’s a pause, but the grip doesn’t loosen, and then the voice says, “Say that again?”    
  
 _“Let go!”_ Japanese, from his father. He had a father, though his memories of him were fractured even before Epsilon, and a black box now takes place of his family name—all he had left to give to his children.  
  
“Dude, was that even the same language? Can you cut me some slack, here? If you haven’t noticed, we’re short on a few Google Translates!”  
  
How many had they been? Was he older, younger, middle in the birth order? How many had he hated, how many had he loved, how many had been both? Did any of them still remember David? Was there anyone left to remember? Some days he can’t recall; Epsilon took away as much as he gave.   
  
“Wash, how about trying Sangheili?”  
  
Tucker. It was only Tucker. You’re not there anymore.  
  
Wash. Right.   
  
He shakes his head, pulling against Tucker’s grip, more gently but more persistently than his nightmare-and-panic-ridden thrashes, and after a moment Tucker gets the message and lets go.  
  
Words. He needed words. But which? Too many are in his head; the echoes of Epsilon scream.   
  
Sight kicks in.   
  
Tucker brought a flashlight with him, and its low battery makes it give off a soft yellow glow, barely keeping steel-dark shadows at bay. Wash sits up on the makeshift cot; Tucker has taken a seat beside. Tucker had tried to dye his hair the same color as his armor—Teal? Cyan? Aqua?—before they had left for Blood Gulch, but now it’s gone to a kind of off-green that seems to glow in the dim light, and starting to show dark at the roots. He’d removed the aquamarine gems he usually wore in one ear and above the opposite brow, and Wash stares for a minute at the sudden symmetry. Tucker, for his part, watches Wash with dark eyes that swirl with galaxies. Prophecy stuff, Tucker had (sort-of) explained. He doesn’t lean close; he doesn’t try to touch Wash; he just waits, and with each blink stars are born then become dust.   
  
Wash takes a few deep breaths, runs his hands through his hair. He closes his eyes— _brown and dark like the trees around here, the ones with thorns and bright blue berries that you had to stop Caboose from eating, and it was someone else who had deep green eyes_ —The little trinket he had received from Caboose seems to burn at his right ear, and its sibling on the left is starting to reciprocate, but he doesn’t have the heart to remove them. His shaking stops eventually, the room stops spinning not long after, and after what feels like an eternity his thoughts slow down enough that he can think about what he’s going to say.  
  
“Are you hurt?” Tucker asks before he could explain.   
  
_Depends how you look at it_ , Wash thinks, but just shakes his head.   
  
“Can you breath?” he asks, in the tone of one who didn’t really know if he was asking the right questions.   
  
Wash opens his mouth to speak, but the words aren’t there. He gives a tense nod.   
  
“Do you need, like, water, or something?” A shake of the head this time; his throat feels parched but he doesn’t want to drown out the words he’s still looking for.  
  
“Bad dream?” Tucker supplies. There’s an odd gentleness in his voice, and for some reason that makes Wash ashamed. He opens his eyes, looks at Tucker. His throat is raw with the screams he’d restrained. He gives another nod as he reaches inside himself, searching for sound.  
  
“Okay,” Tucker said, nodding like this all made complete and utter sense. “Bad dreams suck, but they don’t hurt, right?”   
  
“If only you knew,” Wash finally manages. He winces as he hears his own voice, sounding terrible and nothing short of strangled, but it’s there and it’s his; that was not taken away from him, at least.   
  
“He speaks!” Tucker says, and he looks relieved. Then something passes over his features that Wash doesn’t quite trust. Tucker continues, “Now tell me. What day is it?”   
  
It’s a question random enough that Washington says, “What?” without thinking.   
  
“Seriously, what day is it?”   
  
Wash thinks about that. “The 10th night since we’ve crashed,” he said, his voice getting stronger as he went, “but this planet’s trajectory is different from Earth’s, and since most of our tech went down I’d have to estimate it at—“   
  
“Okay, okay, I’ll give you that one. Now tell me where we are?”   
  
Wash gives him an even look, and in the driest tone he could muster, he said, “We’re stuck in color-coordinated teams on opposite ends of the canyon, and we have no idea where we are, Tucker, that’s why we’re trying to get the comm tower up and running.”   
  
“Okay, now, tell me what your name is?”   
  
Wash scoffs. “First name Agent, last name Washington, _Lavernius_. Stop trying to take advantage of the situation to win your bet with Caboose.”   
  
Tucker doesn’t even look ashamed. “Well you’re going to have to tell us one day, Wash, and he already won round one when you took off your helmet in front of him first, so you owe me.”   
  
Wash rolls his eyes. “Keep playing, Tucker.”  
  
“That’s what she said, bow-chicka-bow-wow.”   
  
There’s a short span of silence. Wash half-expects Tucker to get up and leave, but he’s also half-resigned that that’s not Tucker’s way of doing things. Tucker would make a good soldier, if only he applied himself, but he was already a good…teammate ( _Wash had to stop himself from labeling him as a friend; life would find a way to ensure that that much sentimentality would be punished_ ).   
  
Tucker coughs, then says, “Wanna talk about it?”   
  
The most weary sigh ever escapes from Wash’s lips. “No.”   
  
Tucker looks at him disbelievingly. “You know, since the whole crash and all, things have been pretty stressful. It’s okay to have bad dreams.”   
  
That brings another tide of memories, Wash’s own this time, but no less “pleasant.” Waking up screaming, waking up to a bunch of people in white holding him down, sleep and its demons in the sharpness of their needles, their knives. He manages to keep his tone even when he says, “Not where I’ve been.”    
  
“What happened to you that it’s not okay to yell in a nightmare?”   
  
“You don’t want to know.”   
  
“Actually I kinda do; that’s why I asked.”   
  
“I don’t want to remember. So leave it.”   
  
Frustration fills Tucker’s features. In his eyes, comets collide. “You cryptic fuck,” he says, and it looks like he’s trying to keep his tone down. Maybe not to wake Caboose. “Scream, yell, swear! You know, be normal! It’s totally okay!”   
  
Wash snorts, and he’s about to reply to that, when the situation catches up to him, and he asks, “Tucker, why are you in my room?” “Room” was perhaps too generous a description, but the fact was that the place where Wash slept (or tried to) was a good distance away from where Tucker or Caboose slept. Wash had insisted on that - their makeshift base was still a base, and points of entry and their ammo/weapons still needed to be guarded, even if the only threat was Sarge deciding that he was bored.   
  
Tucker looks like he has a smartass comment for that ( _he always had a comment for everything_ ) sharp at the tip of his tongue, but he looks at Wash again and seems to re-think that. It’s a show of restraint that’s so unusual for Tucker that Wash is taken aback.  
  
Then he looks away, a mutters, “I just got up for a drink of water, okay, and I…decided to look in, okay?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Look, Caboose made me do it after Church left,” Tucker says, his tone defensive. “We—He wanted to make sure you didn’t up and leave us, you know, for Freelancer problems. And it was either this or, like, microchip you or something, so you’re welcome for this alternative, Wash.”   
  
Wash…could only blink at that. “You two…watch me sleep?” he manages. He isn’t sure if he should try to correct this or if he should file it under, “Things That You Accept As Blue Team Leader.”   
  
Tucker suddenly couldn’t look him in the eye. “Hey, don’t make it weird. And it’s not like you were sleeping anyway. You were thrashing around, and I’m pretty sure you would’ve gutted yourself or something if you didn’t insist on wearing Kevlar under-suits like pajamas.” Wash glances down at himself almost guiltily, and he could see evidence of Tucker’s words at the fabric over his stomach, his chest; could feel it now in the ache under his nails. Tucker continued, “But really scary quiet, no wonder we didn’t catch on sooner. I didn’t know if you were, like, being possessed by some freaky force pissed off at us ‘cuz we disturbed it, or whatever. I mean, for all we know, this planet could be haunted or something. I freaked, okay?”   
  
Wash pinches the bridge of his nose. Of all the things to survive the crash, Sarge’s stories had to be some that came away completely intact. “What did I tell you about watching those movies?”   
  
“Dude, totally worth it. What else are we supposed to do around here? And quit changing the subject.”  
  
There’s a rush of guilt, and now it’s Wash’s turn to look away. But he can’t talk about it, the wounds are too fresh in his head, and he can hear Epsilon screaming. Or maybe those were his own screams, the ones that he’d trapped inside himself, no matter how hard they clawed at his throat, his lips, because then he’d never be let out. It was a miracle they didn’t have cameras in the rooms, or else he’d tear himself apart forcing himself to be still - or had that been just more games?   
  
Nights like this remind him how messed up that had all been.   
  
Tucker is waiting. Wash wants to talk; about the past, and the present, and he wants to reassure Tucker that he won’t just abandon them, because he knows what abandonment feels like - that abandonment is its own kind of betrayal.   
  
But not tonight. He’s already exhausted; there’s not enough energy in him to say those things even if he did have the words. So all he can say is, “Okay.”   
  
“…Wait, ‘okay’?”   
  
“Yes, okay.”   
  
Tucker looks like he’s floundering for something to say, but manages, “Okay.”   
  
Aaaaaannnndddd things were about as emotional as they were going to get.   
  
“Tucker?”   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“Please get out so I can try sleeping again.”   
  
Tucker rolls his eyes. “Pfft, ‘try.’ You’re welcome, Wash. But this isn’t forgotten, you know.”   
  
The second most weary sigh ever escapes from Wash’s lips. “Yeah, I know.”   
  
“Just, you know, talk sometimes. Be as dramatic and broody as you want. That sounds like something that would help you.”   
  
“…Thanks, Tucker.”   
  
“Don’t mention it. Seriously.” But there’s a certain softness to Tucker’s features that’s usually reserved for when he’s talking about Junior. “Do you need me to tuck you in?”    
  
“Hell. No.”  
  
“You don’t know what you’re missing out on,” Tucker says. He stands to leave, then looks at the pile of armour next to the cot, pale blue and ghostly. He rummages and finds the gloves, worn under the gauntlets, and tosses them to Wash. “So you don’t hurt yourself. Christ, it’s like Junior and scratch mitts all over again.”   
  
Wash blinked at that. “Junior used to scratch himself when sleeping?”   
  
“When sleeping, yes, but not to himself.” Tucker hitched up his shirt. Elongated scars ran up and down his flanks. “Little guy had nightmares for a while, and wouldn’t sleep without me.” He put his shirt back down. “Try to sleep in, okay?”   
  
Wash gives a wry smile. “You’re not getting out of training, Tucker.”  
  
Tucker shrugs. “Was worth a shot.”  
  
Tucker goes back to his own room, then. But he leaves the flashlight. Wash pulls on the gloves; his hands ache less. He lies back down, and shuts his eyes.   
  
Wash doesn’t yell when he has nightmares; the echoes of Epsilon scream enough for the both of them.


End file.
